Australian Football League holds combines in U.S. to recruit athletes, many of whom know nothing about game

Ask Eric Wallace who his favorite Australian Football League player is, and he’ll look back as though you just introduced yourself in Gaelic.

“Uhhhhh ...” replied the former Seattle University basketball player.

Ask Derrell Acrey when he’d first heard of Australian Rules Football, and he’ll chuckle as though you delivered a punchline from his favorite comic.

“A week ago?” answered the former Boise State running back.

Ask Malcolm White to field a rolling Aussie Rules-style football, and you’ll get an image resembling a farmer trying to scoop up a fleeing chicken.

“This makes us all look pretty uncoordinated,” said the former LSU basketball player.

This was in August. By March, White, like the other two dozen athletes in the building that day, was hoping to be playing the sport for hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Right now, you see, there is an undertaking in the Land Down Under. The Australian Football League, the sole professional association for the country’s most popular game, is extending is tentacles over 19 time zones in an attempt to recruit Americans.

Its first major step came Aug. 28 at Velocity Sports in Redondo Beach, when the AFL hosted the inaugural Australian Football U.S. combine, luring 25 athletes from across the nation to test their speed, agility, endurance and coordination. The league’s line of thinking? Very Olympic-like: Faster, higher, stronger.

“At the end of the day, the U.S. has phenomenal athletes, and sports is such a part of the culture in America,” said Tony Woods, the AFL’s international development manager. “We believe one of the critical components of expanding our league is to recruit U.S. athletes.”

And in one afternoon, those athletes showed why.

Potential millionaire

Before Aug. 28, the record for vertical leap in an Australian Football combine was 78 centimeters (approximately 30.7 inches), held by Nic Naitanui of the AFL’s West Coast Eagles. After that date, Naitanui ranked seventh on the all-time list.

In less than an hour’s time, six Americans surpassed the mark, including Acrey, whose 90-centimeter jump highlighted the event’s athletic displays. In the words of former AFL player Tadhg Kennelly, who was in Redondo demonstrating the basics of the game: “The idea is that these guys have explosiveness that we just don’t have.”

But the vertical leaps’ significance go beyond mere showmanship. Despite this being an Australian football combine, 20 of the 25 event’s participants were college basketball players — and none of them was a point guard.

One of the key positions in Australian football is the “ruckman,” which typically is the team’s tallest player, and whose key responsibility is to obtain possession for his club by tipping the ball to a teammate midair. So if the AFL figured they could find someone between 6-6 and 6-10 who could leap three feet off the ground, it would be kind of like the Jamaican bobsledders in “Cool Runnings” — you have the physical ability, we’ll teach you the rest.

And man, was there a lot to teach.

Before the combine last month, most of the athletes’ exposure to the sport came courtesy of YouTube — a video crash course that essentially convinced the guys “OK, I can do this ... eventually.”